Shiva Baby (2020)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) There are a few things I like about Shiva Baby, the biggest being its willingness to spend most of its running time in an enclosed house, in near-real-time, to study how its character reacts under severe multi-pronged stress thanks to the close presence of her former love, current sugar daddy, wife and baby of said sugar daddy, comically intense parents and overbearing family members. It’s a pressure cooker all right, and I have to admire the unity of action, place and time that writer-director Emma Seligman commits to. Rachel Sennott is not a bad anchor for the film, and the dark comedy of the film gets more and more intense as everything goes wrong for the heroine. There’s also an interesting intersectionality of elements — Jewishness, bisexuality, aimlessness, paranoia and anxiety—that give the film a unique atmosphere. Alas, I’m just about out of compliments, because the way Shiva Baby chooses to approach its material is that of a horror thriller — music, cinematography, editing and sound design are tuned to bring us inside the protagonist’s truly unpleasant mind, unable to deal effectively with the various problems to befall her—many of them of her own doing. What could have been funny with a different take on the material becomes obnoxious. The protagonist doesn’t take a long time to become irritating, except that the very nature of the film means that we’re stuck not just with her, but inside her perceptions until the end of the film. This is where the strengths of the film flip into annoyances if you’re not part of its target audience, or willing to play along. By the time Shiva Baby ends its mercifully short 78 minutes, I’ve had enough — and I’m not interested in any sequel.